Parashat Bo: On Freedom and Eternity

Something changes about the Torah’s narrative in the middle of this week’s parsha. For 9 plagues we have followed the story as it unfolds in the normal narrative time of Egypt – with its warning speeches to Pharaoh, description of the plagues and their repercussions, and the continual hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Now suddenly, on the eve of the 10th plague, on the eve of the transition from slavery to freedom, the narrative ceases to exist only in the present of Egyptland, and moves into a new type of “Torah” discourse aimed at “all eternity.”

Here, for the first time, are mitzvot, commandments, like the paschal sacrifice and the redemption of the first born and the holiday of Passover and the wearing of tefillin and the retelling of the story to one’s children. These mitzvot transport the narrative out of its present time and into a kind of eternal time. Again and again, the Torah says that these commandments should be kept ledoroteikhem hukat olam -- for all your generations, as an eternal rule. Somehow, the present moment of that first Passover is larger than life, a time that touches all future generations.

On the eve of our national freedom, we learn what true freedom means -- a connection to eternity. For, as mortals, we are in some sense still in bondage in Egypt, bounded in by the limitations of our time on this earth. We are none of us free of death, and therefore, in some sense, always constrained. (Don’t we find time to be our biggest daily and lifelong constraint – if only I had the time . . . ?)

At the moment of their transition from slavery to freedom, the Israelites experience a present moment that is totally free because it is forever. That moment – which is repeatedly called b’etzem hayom hazeh, “on that very day” (or, literally, “on the essence of that day”) – is such a deep moment of present time that it somehow breaks the barriers of history and exists in some other divine space of non-time or all-time.

How do we replicate this? How do we access this kind of eternal time in our own lives? The Torah and its mitzvot are meant to be our way in. The Torah is our etz hayim, which means not just “tree of mortal life” but tree of eternal life, of “living,” of knowing how to be a truly free, “living” human being.

Blessings are a classic example of how this works – they sanctify the everyday, invest each act with deeper significance, so that we feel how the present moment opens up to a field of eternity. Blessings are the concept, but the attitude should pervade everything. We know this feeling from holidays like Passover or Rosh HaShanah when we naturally exist on some vertical plain, connected to all past generations who have celebrated in this way. With the right attitude, every day, every moment could become such a doorway – like the bloodied one of the Passover night – to freedom, to redemption, to this feeling of timelessness. The key is to dig deeply – to access the present in the form of an etzem hayom hazeh -- to feel the present in its essence as presence. The deeper the present, the deeper the access to that out of bounds time, that freedom from mortal constraint, that sense of Eternal Presence.